A Dyson. A Dyson dust-buster.*
When we moved into a house, it was high on my list of things to buy. Don't get me wrong, I love Horace (the Hoover; also a Dyson, purchased for my flat as the only vacuum in Peckham that would nestle into a small cupboard, due to its revolutionary telescopic hose), but we've never worked well together. Terry has a much better way with Horace, and we agreed early on that he'd be in charge of hoovering and I'd be in charge of... oh, gosh, everything else, by the looks of things. Somehow, we've been here 11 months and I've really never felt the need for a hand-held. T was doing pretty well at hoovering fortnightly in principle and 3-weekly to monthly in practice, and the blips when it got done less frequently were easy to excuse since we had a new baby. Only the baby's not that new any more, and the hoovering hadn't been done for 6 weeks by the time Terry got to it last weekend. To his credit, he's very thorough, but getting on for 3 hours to hoover a two bedroom terrace is verging on the preposterous. Since a pair of lesbians, a gay and a bickering couple then pitched up for the evening and brought leaves and what not with them, it got me thinking about the dust buster idea again. I ran it by T and he agreed (he's got the money now: I'm on a hundred nicker a week; I have no say), so I sought help from the magic web and found the cheapest, and then did as I always do with big purchases and got scared about being £x poorer, and didn't order.
In the night, trying to get back to sleep after feeding the baby, I remembered that we'd mulled over having a cleaner, which we never did because I'm uncomfortable with yet another recurring cost but primarily with asking someone else to clean up our mess. Once I worked out that the Dyson would cost the equivalent of around 4 weeks' cleaning, it felt like less of an extravagance so I ordered it the next day and it arrived mid-week, and Terry got it out of its box today. (Re: tardiness: I, post-natally, have no truck with instructions and T - well, he works late then comes home and does nowt).
Like Horace, the DC-16 (it took us 12 days to name the baby, this could take a while) is fantastically engineered, with really clever touches that just can't be recreated in prose (poetry to follow). Terry was impressed with the battery charger/dock and found a little nook for it underneath the stairs; he then finished reading the instructions and found that the device has to be attached to the battery while it charges, so drilled two more holes further down the stairs and moved the little dock, and 'Dennis' (temporary name) now has a full-time home:
*Apologies to ?Black and Decker for use of their proprietary name for the hand-held vacuum cleaning device.
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